Making a Splash: Is Tulsi Gabbard the Next Democratic Party Star?

“I grew up with the Aloha Spirit,” says Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. “We try to treat everyone with respect. Like family.”

We’re heading toward Honolulu’s Keehi Lagoon Park, where the first-term U.S. representative, dressed in a scarlet blouse and black trousers, will be putting in an appearance at the Hawaii Ports Maritime Council’s Ohana BBQ. “If you’ve never been to a Hawaiian barbecue,” she says, grinning, “let me tell you: There will be a lot of food.”

She’s not kidding. As Gabbard is greeted with the traditional leis (you wind up wearing a lot of flowers in her line of work), burly longshoremen step from the serving line with heaping plates of chicken, sticky-sweet desserts, and devoutly un-Bloombergian plastic cups of soda and beer. It’s proof positive of the local saying: In Hawaii, you don’t eat until you’re full, you eat until you’re tired.

Area politicians are here to express their solidarity with the local maritime unions. There’s the newly appointed U.S. senator, Brian Schatz, a bit too eager to please in his blinding yellow-and-green shirt, and boyish city councilman Stanley Chang, who fairly squeaks with ambition. And then you have Gabbard, a tanned 32-year-old with mahogany-brown hair that falls just past her shoulders, a fit surfer’s physique, and a smile so warm that it’s no surprise Web sites have offered polls rating her “hotness.”

Yet this is no Democratic Sarah Palin—all barracuda populism and you-betcha sass. She takes the stage and calmly expresses her support for the shipping policies that matter so much to her audience, making no attempt to rev up the crowd—this is a barbecue, after all, not a campaign rally. Still, when she finishes, the listeners explode into applause. Gabbard steps from the dais, and audience members rush to hug her and urge her to run for governor or senator.

“She’s our rock star,” says a man in an expensive suit, who hastily adds, “Don’t quote me.” He hands me his card and I understand why: He works for a rival Democratic politician.

When Gabbard came from seemingly nowhere last year to become the U.S. representative for Hawaii’s Second District, she was more than just one example of what was proudly being called the Year of the Woman (meaning that female participation in Congress had finally reached, ahem, 18.3 percent). Along with fiery Iraq War veteran Representative Tammy Duckworth, New York’s Representative Grace Meng, and Wisconsin’s openly gay Senator Tammy Baldwin—not to mention Chelsea Clinton waiting somewhere in the wings—she’s in a vanguard of women leaders positioning themselves to succeed such long-running institutions as Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Dianne Feinstein.

But even by the standards of her peers, Gabbard stands out, and not only because she’s the youngest woman in Congress. She also comes across as an embodiment of the Obama era, with its shattering of political stereotypes and explosion of cultural diversity. Indeed, Gabbard seems to specialize in firsts: She’s the first person born in American Samoa to be elected to Congress; the Congress’s first elected Hindu (she took her oath of office on the Bhagavad Gita); and along with Duckworth, one of its first two female combat veterans. She also happens to be a lifelong vegetarian, a student of martial arts (she has spent years doing Brazilian capoeira), and an avid surfer who tells me, “Every time I get home for a district work week, I make sure I get out on the water a couple of times for an early-morning session. It recharges the batteries.”

Following Gabbard around Oahu and the Big Island for two days, I’m struck by her soldier’s tirelessness: She listens with a measured stillness (born, perhaps, of her martial-arts training), gently nodding at her constituents’ concerns, breaking into a big smile when she greets their children. She makes a point of not talking at people and is savvy enough to avoid coming off as a politician. Between events, she’ll take a sip or two of ginger kombucha to keep her energy up. And at the end of a fourteen-hour day, when I’m ready to melt into the hotel bath, she’s still going strong—lacing up her running shoes for a jog.

“I think she’s wonderful,” House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer tells me. “She’s been in combat in a leadership role, and she knows how to lead. She deals well with men and women, young and old, Republican and Democrat. She’s got an extraordinary political talent.”Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who picked Gabbard to speak at the Democratic National Convention last year, describes her as “an emerging star”—while signaling that as a newcomer she has something to prove. “Some fresh recruits stay and some go. It’s hard to tell what route she’ll choose.”

Her parents would never have predicted Tulsi, a painfully shy and introverted child, would grow up to be a politician. “My siblings”—Gabbard has three older brothers and a younger sister—“were all more outgoing than I was,” she admits. “My sister and I were close—and if there was any talking to be done, she was the spokesperson for us. That was just fine by me.”

But as her father, Mike (now a Hawaii state senator), remembers, “When we look back, there were these qualities like determination and focus. When Tulsi was ten she said, ‘Dad, there’s this Typing Tutor program.’ ” He and his wife, Carol, were homeschooling all five of their children at the time, shaping the curriculum to their interests. They bought the program, and a year later: “She goes, ‘Watch this.’ She’s eleven, typing 120 words a minute.”

In those years, Gabbard says, she had a yearning “to be part of something bigger than myself.” At fifteen, she cofounded with her father a nonprofit environmental organization, Healthy Hawai’i Coalition, and then at 21, when a seat came open in the state legislature, she made a surprise decision to run, despite her almost paralyzing fear of speaking in public. “It never entered my mind that this would require giving speeches,” she says now, laughing. “The first one I gave was at an elementary school, and there were 300 people. I thought I was going to throw up, I was so nervous.”

But she delivered that speech and more; she knocked on doors, turned out inexpensive black-and-white flyers (“I didn’t have any money,” she says. “We made every dollar count”), and won the election—becoming among the youngest women voted to statewide office in U.S. history. That year, 2002, it seemed easy to believe in something called Team Gabbard. Her mother, Carol, was already on the State Board of Education; her father was getting elected to the Honolulu City Council; and Tulsi wasn’t just her district’s new representative but appeared cut from the same cloth as her parents. She shared their vegetarianism, their attraction to Hinduism (which she adopted as a teen), and the hard-line social conservatism that has made her father, in particular, a bugbear to women’s groups and the LGBT community to this day.

She was also happily married—to her childhood sweetheart Eduardo Tamayo. “You know,” she says wryly, “young love. We surfed together and were best friends. His family was like my family.” Gabbard’s personal life and career looked steady; then, in the spring of 2003, the United States invaded Iraq, and she made a choice that dismayed her political advisers: She joined the Hawaii Army National Guard, and when her brigade was deployed to Iraq in 2004 and her name was left off the deployment list, she insisted on going anyway.

“The reason I went was apolitical,” she says. “I knew I couldn’t sit back in the safety of home and normal life while my fellow soldiers were marching off to this foreign country. I went to my commander and said I wanted to deploy. He said no.” She laughs. “I don’t take no very well.”She found she loved basic training. “From day zero, you get off the bus,” she says, “and the bond that’s created between you and your fellow soldiers is unlike anything I’ve experienced. And yes, when you’re low-crawling through the mud beneath barbed wire and climbing over rock walls and rappelling down the sides of buildings—I enjoy it.” A pause. “I’m pretty good at it, too.”

Gabbard served two tours, the first as a medical operations specialist in a base known as LSA Anaconda, nicknamed “Mortaritaville” for all the enemy fire it received (“We had lots of daily attacks,” she says. “It was a very real thing”), the second as a military-police platoon leader. “I won’t tell you everything I’ve done in my life I’ve done without fear,” she tells me. “It’s overcoming the fear and knowing where to go to get that courage. That’s really been the experience: having to come to grips with the reality—you’re fighting for the man to your left and right, and you understand what the outcome might be.”

Wartime changed her. For starters, it cost Gabbard her marriage to Tamayo. “It was sad and difficult, but unfortunately, not an uncommon story for people who go through being separated for nearly two years,” she says. “The stress that’s placed on those who are left at home—it’s difficult to communicate what that means.”

Iraq shaped her foreign-policy thinking as well. “It was a war of choice rather than of necessity,” she says. “Did we do some good things? Absolutely. But ten years, hundreds of thousands of troops who were facing and continue to face the effects of serving . . . the cost is almost immeasurable.” Today she wants to get our soldiers out of Afghanistan as soon as possible and is wary of America’s serving as the world’s policeman. More telling, perhaps, she’s come to disavow the social conservatism she’d been raised with.

“I love my parents dearly,” she explains, “but serving in the Middle East I saw firsthand the extreme negative effects when a government attempts to act as a moral arbiter for its people. It’s not government’s place to interfere, especially in those areas that are most personal—for a woman, her right to choose, or who a person chooses to spend their life with.”

It was this Iraq-forged Tulsi Gabbard who pulled off her upset victory for Congress in 2012. When she first announced, she trailed her Democratic primary opponent, former Honolulu mayor Mufi Hannemann, in the polls by nearly 50 points. But over the next seven months, she ran a grassroots campaign that drew a combination of young voters and veterans in a state with long and important military ties. Voters liked her service—liked that she walked the walk. Gabbard won the nomination by 20 points and took the general election with 81 percent.

One hot afternoon, Gabbard takes me to her favorite shaved-ice shop, Island Snow, which has become famous because President Obama takes his family there for what is essentially the Platonic ideal of a sno-cone. “There’s nothing like a little sugar pick-me-up,” she says as we join the long line. Though everyone seems to know her, she makes casual small talk—just another Hawaiian seeking refreshment on a warm day.

As we crunch through our ice drenched in condensed milk and mango syrup, I ask what she hopes to get done in office. Like all new Democratic congresspersons, she has a long wish list of (mainly liberal) ideas, including more stringent financial regulation (“I don’t think Dodd-Frank went far enough”), protecting Social Security and Medicare in their current form (she opposes Obama’s proposal of so-called chained CPI), and more money for missile defense. She’s particularly vocal on the last subject: “For us here in Hawaii, North Korea is a real threat. It drives me insane when I hear talking heads on TV saying, ‘This is just saber-rattling. They can’t reach the U.S. with their missiles. Hawaii or Guam, but not the continental U.S.’ Really blowing off the fact that we’re the fiftieth state, and we’re in a very strategic place with strategic national assets.”

From her seat on the House Committees on Foreign Affairs and Homeland Security, she has argued this tough line and has begun sponsoring veteran-friendly legislation. Of course, achieving much of anything seems unlikely in these days of political gridlock. Every place she goes, somebody asks some version of the question “What in the heck is going on in Washington?” Isn’t she as frustrated as the public is?

The answer is obviously yes, but at this early stage she’s moving cautiously, positioning herself as open to all ideas—even winning a few fans across the aisle. “Having someone like Tulsi to work with is a pleasure,” says Republican representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina. “There are a number of issues on which we disagree, but she’s not one for partisan rhetoric.” And then there are the alliances within her own party, which will be key to her political future. She has been named one of five vice-chairs of the Democratic National Committee—a plum role for a House rookie—and has forged friendships with everyone from Representative Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona (another freshman lawmaker) and Newark mayor and potential Senate candidate Cory Booker (“She’s one of the leading voices in the party now,” says Booker) to Harold & Kumar actor and former White House liaison Kal Penn. The two men threw their weight behind Gabbard when she put herself forward in December to fill the Senate vacancy left by the death of Daniel Inouye. In the end, Hawaii’s governor passed her over for the nomination—but the move was a hint of her broader political ambitions.

For now, Gabbard, who is single, must content herself with the unglamorous life of a freshman House member: jetting ten hours and six time zones for district visits, splitting her time between her tiny apartment on Capitol Hill and her modest rental (a small unit behind another house) in Kailua. You’ll get nowhere asking if any of it wears on her. This is a woman who takes obvious pride in being a good soldier who approaches things with a blend of stoicism and hope.

“Before the campaign, some people asked me, ‘Why would you want to come to work in Congress at a time like this? Congress is the least-liked body in the country.’ But it’s at times like this that the hard work is necessary. People at home don’t care whether you’ve got a D or R in front of your name. They want you to get things done.”